Final Fantasy XII looks best on PC — but you’ll need a beefy rig

Jeff Grubb

1 week ago

Final Fantasy XII isn't exactly well optimized for PC, but it's still the best way to play the game.

With Final Fantasy XII’s launch on Steam, Square Enix has released one of its best games on the PC. The publisher has done some work to ensure this is the best-looking version of the role-playing game — especially when it comes to framerate. After rolling out Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro at 30 frames per second, you can now finally experience this gorgeous classic at a full 60 FPS … if you have the hardware.

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII a bit on my PC, and I was fudging with the settings to see what was possible. I was happy to see that 60 frames per second is possible, but you are going to have to dive into the graphics options to hit that target even if you’re rocking the latest i7 CPU and a 1080 Ti GPU.

That’s something that graphics-analysis experts over at Digital Foundry broke down in its latest video today. You can see that even with its i5-8600K and Titan X Pascal, Digital Foundry was struggling to maintain 60 frames per second at 4K resolution. You might think that’s normal for a 4K game, but this is an upgrade of a PlayStation 2 game from 2006.

It turns out that Square Enix has unlocked a number of graphics options in Final Fantasy XII on the PC, and that is why it is so graphically intensive to run.

So if you do want to get it to run well at 60 frames per second at any particular resolution, you’ll want to make a few tweaks. Start by turning down the ambient occlusion. You can also turn down multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) to around 4X. As Digital Foundry explains, that will put you on part with the PlayStation 4 graphics settings, but you could get 60 frames per second — and that’s something the PS4 cannot do.

Hopefully, Square Enix pushes out some optimization updates that improves Final Fantasy XII’s performance across all levels of PC hardware. And let’s also keep our fingers crossed that the publisher does more work to ensure that Final Fantasy XV runs well on PC before launching that game later this year.